Ralien Bekkers

COP21 Policy Coordinator

Ralien Bekkers is a Master’s Candidate of Environmental Management at Yale University and currently works as an intern at the United Nations Executive Office of the Secretary-General. She has a B.Sc. degree in Future Planet Studies from the University of Amsterdam. In order to be able to attend Yale, she successfully crowd funded her tuition in The Netherlands, which is her country of origin. She is the former Dutch Youth Representative on Sustainable Development to the United Nations (2012-2014) and worked in that position primarily on the post-2015 development agenda and climate change, and in that capacity attended COP18 and COP19 as well as the Rio+20 conference and other related UN meetings in the years after. Moreover, she is a Board Member of the Dutch Sustainability Organization Urgenda and works on multiple sustainability initiatives at Yale University. In her work and research she mainly focuses on improving global governance to better serve future generations, and on long-term corporate strategy in the light of climate change and sustainable development, including the link between those issues. For COP21 she is supporting the coordination of the policy work for SustainUS.